


the gossamer thread you fling

by cracktheglasses (cormallen)



Category: Black Jewels - Anne Bishop, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Black Jewels Fusion, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, The Force Awakens Kinkmeme, slight Poe/Rey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-05-31 22:47:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6490321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cormallen/pseuds/cracktheglasses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Rey is a young Black Widow Queen, biding her time in the Jakku desert. Kylo Ren is a volatile Warlord Prince in service to a demon-dead Priest. The witch storm when they finally meet is probably inevitable</i>.<br/>(or, Black Jewels fusion AU)<br/>CURRENTLY ON HIATUS</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt at [tfa_kink](https://tfa-kink.dreamwidth.org/1841.html?thread=2704945): Rey/Kylo Ren, Black Jewels AU. 
> 
> I started tinkering with this back in January, wrote like a motherfucker right away and then... yeah. I am shame-faced, OP, and hope this makes up for the wait at least some. It is woefully not even remotely close to done, however, I will be trying to update as soon as I can with the rest of what I have, after I've cleaned it up some. I am not quite sure about after that. I am posting this as a WIP as sort of a motivator for me to get off my ass; I've never posted WIP before, so... guess we'll see. 
> 
> Title from Walt Whitman.

**Ben.**

He doesn’t realize he half-wants his mother to deny paternity until the day of his Birthright ceremony. He knows she won’t. There is no reason for her to do so; his father loves his mother, everyone says, though she has never been his Queen, not like she is uncle Luke’s, or uncle Lando’s. Luke’s told him he’d known he was hers before they’d even met, long before he knew he was her brother, too, and Ben can’t help but wonder what such a bond feels like. Like everything suddenly slotting into its right and proper place in the universe, Luke had explained; a belonging like no other, knowing you would do anything she needs of you and do it gladly. A submission, Ben rephrases mentally, and the thought is uneasy, unwelcome.

“What if she asks something -- something you can’t do? Something -- horrible?” His mother wouldn’t, he knows; but someone else could, and Luke looks at him with concern, concern tinged with something else, something that may be pity. Ben scowls.

“A good Queen won’t,” Luke says, and ruffles his fingers through Ben’s hair, curling too long around his ears. Luke’s Birthright Green, set in a plain metal ring band, winks, catching light, as his hand withdraws. It’s the Jewel Luke usually lets everyone see; the other, the one he came away with after his Offering, can make some people uneasy. He doesn’t call it in often, doesn’t wear it openly when he does.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Ben argues, willing the scowl to smooth out from his face. “You’re stronger than her. Than my mother.” Leia Organa’s Birthright is the Opal; Blood Opal, but Opal nevertheless. They say she made her Offering late, and in a time of war, and still came away with the Sapphire. It’s impressive, for certain, but she could have worn the Red, he thinks, maybe if she’d taken the time, had made the Offering properly, somewhere attuned to the Darkness, not in the cargo hold of a junker wind coach bound for Tatooine, on the way to get Han Solo out of his mess with the Hutts.

“Stronger than her,” Luke repeats, slowing down. “I’m not, Ben. My Jewels, maybe, but I am not. Not in any way that counts.”

Ben ponders this as they walk down the hill, to the grove where the altar has been set up. Luke has battled the Warlord who’d raised himself up to Emperor, has faced his own father, demon-dead but no less powerful for it. He’s faced the strength of the Black and survived, unbroken, where neither Green nor Gray should have been enough; if that’s not strength, he doesn’t know what is, and he’s still thinking about it when he’s kneeling in front of the altar, sweaty-palmed, heart in his throat.

When it comes to him, the Jewel is Red, red like blood, like a dying sun, and he cradles it in his hands, awed beyond measure. He feels the uncut surface, the smooth heat of it, its power, its spark resonating with something deep inside him, something unfurling, unfolding, spreading out through his veins, and _oh_. Oh, that is what it feels like, strength, the kind of strength to face down -- most anyone. There are so few left who wear the darker jewels, and he is one of them now, Red, and the Darkness so close within reach.

He shows it to his mother first, when he comes out of the grove, and then Luke. A knot he didn’t even know was still in his chest dissipates in relief when his mother hugs him close. “Oh, Ben,” she says, her voice thick and a little ragged. She is proud of him. Overwhelmed, and a little taken aback, but proud.

She grants his father paternal rights. He is a Solo now, Ben thinks, and tries to ignore the way Han’s hands shake when he holds the Red Jewel out to him.

 

**Rey**

She weaves her first Tangled Web before she truly knows what a Tangled Web is.

It isn’t a proper Web by any means; there is no spider-silk to be had in the Jakku desert for a rawboned slip of a child, not without putting herself in mortal danger. Rey uses her fingers to trace the lines into the desert floor, pieces of sand-smoothed rock dotting where the curves intersect. A few threads she pulls from her sleeve and the fraying hem of her shirt braid together into a neat little queue; this she tucks into the center of the pattern, weighted down by her biggest find of the day, a piece of dark blue glass the shade of the evening sky, its edges scraped down by wind and time. She’s found it by the ruin of the old well, in the Poisoned Oasis. She knows it was a bottle once, when the well water had been safe to drink and the Widows training in the Hall at Tuanul would walk down to the little isle of green at dusk to drink their fill and bring back more for their sisters. When she closes her eyes and pulls at the strands of the Web in the sand, she can see them in their sooty Widow’s Weeds, faces veiled in gray against the desert air, before the illusion fades and she is alone again, thankfully, blessedly alone.

In Niima, they say it isn’t safe to be alone in the desert; not in the treacherous sand dunes, nor in the ruins of the Tower-That-Is-Broken, nor in what remains of the Black Widows’ Hall; especially not there. The Widows are long dead or gone, but who knows what spells remain in the stones, dangerous traps that can still flay a man’s flesh from his bones or give him a face full of venom, the kind that chokes the breath from his chest in a hundred steps. They are wrong. Rey has climbed over every floor, every parapet and stair that remains of the Hall, but still hasn’t found anything that scares her more than staying in Niima for too much longer.

Niima is a refuge for those who deserve none, Constable Zuvio likes to repeat; Rey is smart enough to understand he counts himself among them. He is Constable inasmuch as anyone in Niima could be; there is no law to be enforced in this forsaken outpost other than the law of might.

Of might, Rey has precious little.

She has her few treasures in the bag strapped to her side. Among the more useful things, like her face-wrap, and a copper-handled little knife, are the trinkets she’s allowed herself to keep because she can’t bear to trade them away, not even for clean water. A piece of gold chain, the remnant of a setting for a Witch’s Jewel, scavenged from one of the few whole rooms that still remain in the Hall. The intricately carved little box the necklace had been left in, the name of the woman it had belonged to scratched into the underside. Rey thinks of her as she weaves her Web, tries to imagine what Jewel she would have worn, Dosmit Raeh, a Black Widow of Tuanul. She must have been strong and fierce and clever, for the preservation spells to still hold on her quarters, and the ingenious little concealment spell on the door, masking it from any who didn’t know what to look for. It’s less like a concealment spell, and more like a puzzle that leads you away from the solution, Rey decides, and adds another curved thread to the side of the braided rope in her Web’s center. She doesn’t want to be unseen, exactly; she needs to be seen to trade for supplies, or for the scraps of knowledge the few visitors to Niima can share.

She needs to be seen to survive. She just doesn’t need to appear -- quite so much like herself.

She pricks her finger with the copper-handled knife, and lets the blood drip on the dark blue glass, staining it darker. The desert wind stirs up, sudden and strong, like it frequently does out here; it tangles the threads of her web, erases the lines, covers her offerings with shifting sand, as if it accepts them.

No, Rey thinks; not _as if_ it accepts them. She feels the Darkness stirred up by the wind, and decides Dosmit Raeh would approve of the way she’s changed her clever concealment spell. She hopes it lasts as long as the original.

There are no more Queens in the Jakku desert now. No Queens in Niima, none in Cratertown. No Queen, no Court, no Protocol, no Blood Law. There are only the dangerous and the desperate here, and she needs to conceal herself well enough until her people come back for her.

 

**Ben.**

Luke knows.

Luke always knows.

There is a pile of wood waiting for him when he gets back to the courtyard, and Luke is sitting on the low bench, cross legged, an unreadable expression on his face.

Ben starts on the woodpile without waiting for the instruction, angrily snapping the larger pieces in half, and then again and again, the smallest bits already turning to half-serviceable mulch.

“They’re afraid of me,” he snarls, disintegrating a particularly stubborn log, and Luke cocks his head, considering.

“Why do you think that is?”

“You know why,” he responds, and lifts a branch up into the air, sets it alight and watches the ash rain down. “Because I’m -- “

 _too strong_ , _too fast_ , _too dangerous_

“ -- because I’m a Warlord Prince. Because they all think I’m too much like _him_ , Uncle. Even, even my -- “

He doesn’t want to say it out loud; besides, Luke probably knows this, too. His mother can’t have been the only one his father said it to; he’s probably come with it to Luke, his old friend, Luke who spends his days training the settlement children, Ben among them, in Craft.

“He said there’s too much Vader in me. He said it, you can’t tell me he didn’t; I heard him.”

Luke sighs, lifting up from the bench. He can walk, but he chooses to step on air, maybe because it’s something he does without even thinking about it, or perhaps as a reminder to Ben that he could have been working on mastering that, instead of being relegated to mulch duty.

“That isn’t necessarily an unflattering comparison. Your grandfather was a powerful Warlord Prince, Ben, incredibly accomplished in the Craft, an unrivaled warrior -- “

“That isn’t how he meant it and you know it!”

“He had accomplished much,” Luke continues, unperturbed. “When his Queen died -- “

“He let his Queen die,” Ben interjects, and Luke winces. “He lashed out at her, and he hurt her, and he as good as killed her himself. He should have protected her with his life, shouldn’t he have? Isn’t that what you’re always telling me we’re supposed to do?”

A Queen must be protected at all cost; he has learned that. It’s something they’ve all been taught since they were children, but Luke knows like he knows breathing. He may have faced Vader, but he could have never done it without his Queen’s support, without Leia’s strength behind him.

Vader’s Purple-Dusk Queen, she may have been strong in her way, and good and wise, as Luke insists -- she was his mother, after all, and it’s hardly likely he’d name her otherwise. But she was too fragile in the face of the Black, Ben thinks, did not know the strength, the rage her Consort tried to keep contained for her. It was always going to snap, no matter how much he had tried to keep it from her and her from it, and what good was that? What good was that power, leashed, and what good the Queen who could not direct it?

“Ben,” Luke says, brows drawn. “It’s not about the Jewel rank. That isn’t how the bond between a Queen and a Blood male works.” He looks disturbed, and for a moment, Ben thinks about asking him to explain it again, imagines sitting down and listening and pushing the thoughts of both his father and grandfather out of his mind.

“I’m finished with the mulch,” he says instead, and Calls in the barrel, directing the wood chips inside. “Do you want me to make more?”

 

**Rey**

She doesn’t remember ever having been to the sea, but she dreams of it sometimes, nestled into the little hideout she has made under the winding stair of the Tower-That-Is-Broken. The water is deceptively beautiful, a Sapphire Jewel come to life under the pale sky, waves breaking against the islands of Green.

She dreams of the storms. Not the howling, scorching yellow winds of Jakku, but rainstorms, the seawater turning to violent, foam-topped Gray, threads of Red lightning breaking through the darkening clouds, islands vanishing into the thick, treacherous fog. Sometimes, she dreams of the endless, spiraling Abyss, faces she can’t recall upon waking calling to her from the Darkness.

There was a Sapphire Jewel once, she thinks in the dream, struggling to hold on to the memory, but it twists away from her, cloudy and faded as if seen through a veil. It is important, but she cannot even recall why, and the sour ache of frustration roils in her belly, forcing her awake.

The ache doesn’t dissipate when she lifts her muzzy head from her pallet, and her thighs are sticky under her shift; when she probes experimentally with her fingers, they come away red with blood.

“No, no, no,” she mutters to herself, pulling together her supplies. It can’t have been another moon already; it feels too soon, too unexpected, but her body does not lie, and neither do the day marks she has been scratching into the old brick of the Tower. It always feels like it comes on too soon, this affliction that saps her strength, leaves her hurting and tired and confined to her hideaway; these are the days she longs for someone, anyone safe enough to invite in, more than ever.

She is safe from very few in Niima, especially on days like this.

She’d thought she was dying the first time it happened, bleeding out some secret wasting illness that would see her succumb, but the ache and the weakness and the blood were gone a few days later. Still, she had waited, apprehensive, for another bout, and indeed, soon enough, it returned. Miserable and ashamed, she thought of going to the herb-man in Cratertown, but did not make it far before changing her mind. Every step she took through the usually familiar sands seemed to come with difficulty, and the few scavengers she saw on her way, those daring enough to venture out this far, had looked at her strangely, eyes calculating, narrowed; she hugged her arms harder around herself, and tried to press on before running into Mashra.

Perhaps Rey had looked terrified enough, or perhaps the woman had also sensed what everyone else had seemed to be sensing, but Mashra had taken pity on her.

“Your moontime, girl. Don’t you know anything?” Mashra had grumbled, letting Rey into her own temporary refuge by the Tooth, a high jut of sharp jagged rock east of the oasis, a few hours’ walk from Niima; Rey sat cross-legged on the earthen floor and waited for Mashra to finish brewing a foul-smelling tea that proved just as bitter to the taste.

“You are afraid; you have the right of it. It is when you should be most afraid, the time you are most defenseless. Can’t use any of your fancy Craft, just like the rest of us,” Mashra had told her peevishly, but had given her a pouch of the herbs and lichen to steep later all the same.

Mashra must have been broken long before Rey came to Jakku; it hurts her to think about it, but Rey knows how it must have happened, how horrifyingly brutal it must have been. An unforgivable violation; the loss of nearly everything: Jewels, Craft, safety, hope. She wonders if the man who had done it is still in Jakku, or if he has long since left; if anyone has ever paid him back for what he has done, or if he is still owed it. She pictures sliding her copper-handled knife into his gut, twisting it slowly, watching the blood drip, but it is a foolish thought, and it would not make Mashra’s hurt any less.

She traces the day marks she has carved into the wall with her fingers, feels for the scratches in the already harsh brick. She doesn’t remember how many days had passed before she'd begun to keep track; it had seemed like a desperately long time then, but it has surely been a longer time since. She has spent more of her life here than not, she is quite certain of it.

It feels like she has picked the desert clean by now. The Tower and the Hall and all the other ruins can offer her no new treasures, no new answers they have not already, and some of the new visitors to Niima are getting braver, no longer put off by the legends of Black Widows or traps in the sand.

She knows what Mashra would tell her now, if she were to ask:

“You must have your Virgin Night, girl, and you must have it soon, if you wish to have any hope of surviving.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Ben.**

He searches on the Threads when he is restless. His mother suggests it on a really bad day, after he’s certain that their entire town, and maybe a good half of the surrounding villages will never run out of mulch again. 

“It’s something I used to do when I was a little girl,” she tells him, elbows on the tablecloth, cradling her chin in her hands. “I wasn’t supposed to, of course. It was too dangerous, opening yourself up like that, when you didn’t know who may be looking back. But it helped me feel focused. Centered. And -- less alone.”

The way she looks at him across the table scrapes something inside his chest; he almost descends to the Red without meaning to, and has to stop himself abruptly, spiraling back up until his temper is sufficiently restrained. He picks at the tablecloth, aware he’s perilously close to shredding the corner completely, and forces himself to hold still when she reaches out a hand for his, rubs at his too-large knuckles with her thumb. 

Her hands are not a Queen’s hands -- or maybe they are exactly what a Queen’s hands ought to be, he thinks, looking at the scrape close to her wrist, the trace of a burn close to her bitten nail. The skin is worn, worked, warm. When he finally dares to look up, she gives him a little half-smile. The point of her sleeve has dipped into her abandoned teacup; he pulls at it and dries it with a touch of Craft, but the stain has already set into the white cloth, and he is no hearth witch to fix that.

“It’s fine,” she tells him, and doesn’t take her hand away. He didn’t break the cup, or melt her sleeve, or set the tablecloth on fire; that probably is fine enough. 

Ben doesn’t look for anyone specific when he reaches out, the White and Yellow first, then Tiger Eye, Rose, Summer-sky. But his mother is right; feeling the little sparks of the Blood flare up all around him is reassuring, in its own way. He can recognize some of them here, close; a handful of Luke’s students, working at their Craft, the coachmen at the station, the old soldiers who always stay close to the Queen’s court, whether at Alderaan or in Coruscant or here in D’Qar. Her First Circle is there when he thrums the Purple Dusk and the Opal. _Almost_ all of her First Circle, he thinks, feeling for a trace of Luke on the Green, and wonders if other Consorts have really served without wearing Jewels, like his father. Luke says it’s happened before, but he has yet to find a mention of it in the Histories, which can mean only two things: either Luke isn’t telling the truth, or they were never important enough for the books. 

It’s quieter below the Green. He is careful not to disturb Leia as he briefly ventures down the Sapphire thread, a quick brush against her even, banked strength, but he is reluctant to go lower. Aside from Luke, he has never felt a response on the Red, no matter how far he has reached beyond D’Qar, across the Inner Sea, to far-off Yavin, Dantooine, the ruins of Dxun. 

When he is honest with himself, later, he will admit that he is nowhere close to ready when the Red comes back with an answer. 

 

 **Ben.**

There are no male Black Widows, common sense says. Even among women, they’re rare, the Hourglass uneager to give out its secrets. Ben has never met one before, and he thinks nothing of Snoke’s black-lacquered nails, no more than he thinks of the scar that bisects his face, mutilates his jaw, makes his voice come through as a low, sibilant whisper.

That Snoke is demon-dead gives him more pause the first time they meet face to face; it isn’t what he expected when he reached out on the Red thread and felt the answering call, a Dark power so close Ben can hardly believe he is the first one to have found him. It seems strange, ill-fitting, that strength like Snoke’s is finite, a portion of it always draining away to sustain him, but then again, one of Luke’s teachers had been one of the living dead as well, a Guardian, and he was always considered one of the strongest Blood ever to walk the Realms, transition to the unlife notwithstanding. 

Snoke shows him the many things he asks for, and some he does not know enough to ask for. His training with Luke has barely prepared him for this, channelling his anger through the Red. Riding the killing edge until it erupts, a wave of furious power that shatters everything around him, or a target of his choice, though it can be challenging to focus so narrowly. Wrapping himself in the Darkness, concealed from sight, both physical and that of any Jewel lighter than his. It’s much harder to hide himself from the darker ranks, but not impossible, and he practices it until he is sure he can do it if he must, if ever it comes to that. When Snoke deems him ready, a strengthening spell makes his fingers into vicious claws; another gives him the speed to make them deadly.

He closes his eyes at the feel of the black-lacquered nails at his throat, but the blood Snoke takes from him seems like a fair payment for the knowledge. Snoke needs the blood to sustain him; he cannot help needing it anymore than Ben can help needing food, or water, or air. 

Snoke cannot meet him in the daylight; the sun is anathema to the demon-dead, draining their will, their strength, whatever haleness is left to them. Ben doesn’t know where exactly Snoke spends his days, though he doesn’t always spend them sleeping. He touches Ben’s mind on the Red thread whenever he has something new to teach him, and sometimes the summons come when there is still light, when the sun is still high in the rain-washed D’Qar sky. On those days, he makes the trek on foot instead of riding the Winds; it’s gotten easier to slip away from Luke as of late, his hands full with a new crop of eager-eyed children, and Ben’s duties in his mother’s Court have never been too laborious. 

The strange piece of weaving Snoke calls a Tangled Web is something new. 

“Touch it,” Snoke instructs, sweeping a bony hand over the glossy threads. “Reach out with your psychic strength, and tell me what you see.”

It doesn’t seem like a piece of powerful magic, though Ben knows it must be; everything Snoke has shown him so far has had a practical use, combat, armor, protection and offense. He stares at the frame holding the pattern, the dark polished wood gleaming, each airy thread knotting to the next in a shape he cannot divine. 

When he reaches out for it on the Red, it feels at once foreboding and inviting, like a sweetly baited trap, though he cannot imagine why Snoke would need such a thing. At his permitting nod, Ben touches the edge of the frame with his hand, drags the pad of his finger between two knotted lines, and keeps it there as he probes with the Red again, this time a little stronger. The Web responds, a slight pulse in the air, yet still, he cannot see anything new in the threads; they are just shapes, half-finished lace hung between the wooden posts. 

“Is it spider-silk? What is it? What is it supposed to do?” he asks. His teacher crooks his mutilated lip, his pointed tongue running from corner to corner.

“Nothing, yet. I wanted to know if this was something you may have a natural affinity for. You don't, but it's not unheard of, in your line. They say your great-grandmother once wove a Tangled Web upon a wish that changed the course of the world. It is no matter,” Snoke adds quickly, reassuring. “You, my boy, have other talents.”

“These webs, they grant wishes?” Ben asks, withdrawing his hand, and Snoke laughs, a small hissing cackle that quickly sputters out.

“Nothing just grants you anything; you should know that by now,” he says, gathering himself. “But a Web woven with the right intent may let a Black Widow have a glimpse into what is needed for that wish to come to pass -- or, indeed, may pull together the threads of it. For a price.”

“What did she wish for? My great-grandmother?”

Snoke steeples his hands together, black-tinted nails glistening like they are slicked in oil. 

“What does anyone wish for, when given half a chance? Power. Love. Justice. Vengeance, take your pick. In this, as in all Craft, precision matters; a Tangled Web must have a focus, and a strong one, if one has any hope of achieving results.”

“And what was the price?” Ben asks, already certain of the answer, though he would like to hear Snoke say it. “Her life? Is that -- is that what you want from me?”

“Nothing so grand, boy,” Snoke tells him, and fetches a small silver cup from from a drawer. “A bit of your blood will do, to speed the Craft along.”

He bleeds his hand under Snoke’s direction, piercing the blue rolling vein in his wrist over the goblet. The dark red droplets hiss when they hit the spider-silk threads, and vanish, as if devoured. 

Snoke heals the wound with a light touch of Craft, and licks the stray stain of blood from his fingers. “Reach out for the Web again,” he commands, “and see what you will see.”

This time, the reaction is stronger; the web pulses, thrumming at the Red in his veins, a quick flash of heat subsuming him from head to toe. He sees it for a small, brief moment before it is gone, a bright yellow sun, the remains of a lake, a dark ruin of a tower, crumbling with age, nestled on the dried-up shore. 

“There is -- a girl?” he says, uncertain; he thinks he hears Snoke say, “What girl?” before everything is drawn over with Black, deep and cold. His knees no longer holding him up, he crumples to the floor and sees nothing.

 

 **Rey.**

She doesn’t remember the moment she decides that nobody is coming for her. There is no sudden clear awakening, no revelation, no dividing line: hope one morning and gone the next. It’s possible she has always known it, despite that weak hope to the contrary. No; if she wants them, she will have to find her people herself. 

Poe Dameron could have been hers, she thinks, watching his sure stride through the main thoroughfare of Niima Outpost, had he not already been serving a different Queen. 

He is different from the usual visitors to Jakku. He wears his service and his Jewels openly, almost brazenly, Summer-sky pinned to the defiantly cocked collar of his fitted uniform jacket. He must know there are no Queens in Niima, and the locals are eyeing him with a burning, dangerous mixture of envy and apprehension, yet it seems to affect nothing in him, and she longs to ask him if he is truly this cocky -- or this oblivious. She longs to ask him about his Queen’s Court in another breath; what she must be like, the woman he has pledged himself to. Whether he is her lover, whether she has another, whether _he_ has another. Whether the Court is grand or small, whether there is room in it somewhere for a nothing scavenger to earn a contract, if not anywhere close, then in the fifth circle, the sixth, the eighth; she catches herself staring, like the fool girl she had once been and thought she had stifled. Rey averts her gaze, pulls her headwrap down lower over her windburned face. 

He is steps away from her now, but one of Plutt’s men is with him, waxing loquacious about the treasures to be found in the sand dunes in his low desert drawl. 

“Aye, I could guide you right out to the Ol’ Widows’ Hall, and for a more than modest fee,” Plutt’s goon is offering, arms open wide, and Rey sees the trap as clear as the deceptively azure water in the Poisoned Oasis, the wind sweeping through the dust, circling men and circling birds, and bones, bleaching in the sand, topped with a Summer-sky pin. 

Oh, hell’s fire, she thinks, because if she opens her mouth now, there is no coming back from it; Plutt won’t stand for his bounty being taken from right under his nose, and Zuvio and his militia, and Old Mero, and Ergel, and even Mashra and those like her will not get in his way. She cannot afford to take a chance on Poe Dameron unless he is a sure thing, and she doesn’t know what she decides until she suddenly finds herself speaking. 

“This one don’t know his arse from a hole in the ground. I’ll take you, and not for triple the charge, either.” 

_Please listen to me_ is laced through every one of her words. When Dameron turns his handsome face to hers, there is a brief, sharp moment she wishes her clothes were less grimy, but he doesn’t seem to care. He is looking in her eyes, not anywhere else, and she throws her usual caution to the wind, brushing against his mind on a psychic thread.

 _They will kill you, Warlord_ , she pushes between them, and holds out her hand. _I can help you_. “Do we have a deal?”

She takes him west out of town first, to a small outcropping of rocks she likes for the protected vantage point. 

“Plutt’s men will be waiting to ambush us here; it's what I would do. The most convenient spot,” she says, dropping the local jargon and pointing her finger into the woefully inadequate map he has brought with him. “We will circle around through this part here,” she says, tracing the spot someone has so helpfully marked ‘sucking sinkholes; avoid’.

“There are no sinkholes?” Dameron says, eyes twinkling, and she shakes her head.

“Of course, there are sinkholes. Never fear; I know my way around them. So, tell me, Warlord. Is your interest in Black Widows personal, or business?”

“That depends,” says Dameron, and apparently he really is that cocky. “Is your interest in me personal or business?”

In for a drop of water, in for the waterskin, Rey tells herself, and braces for it.

“You won’t find Black Widows here. Not in the Hall, and not in the Oasis, and not on the Pilgrim’s Road. They’re all gone. If you still want to see for yourself, or if you are looking for things still left in the ruins, I understand, and I’ll take you there. Or -- “ 

She takes a deep breath, and touches his mind again, not wanting to say it out loud. _I can take you to meet one. For a price_.

Dameron is strangely silent as they walk on, looping around the dunes, the sun hanging lower and lower on the darkening horizon. She doesn’t know him, hasn’t seen him with his own people, but Rey can tell that even the too-confident, unabashed mask he’d put on in Niima is closer to what he must be like usually, not this quiet, almost brooding concern. 

“Tell me something about yourself,” she asks, unsure whose jitters she is trying to calm; to her relief, Dameron complies. She listens attentively, slowing down to match her stride to his as he talks about his youth, spent in Yavin, where his Queen had first formed her Court, where his parents had served.

His Queen, she must be a much older woman than Rey had first thought, if his parents had spent any time in her service, and so must Dameron himself. It is difficult for her to distinguish ages of outsiders sometimes; people age quicker in the desert, go dry and brittle and frayed long before their time. Dameron’s skin is smooth, though he could use a shave, and his hair is thick, dark, untouched by gray as yet. She doesn’t hide her stare from him this time, though it is odd, and still more than a little scary, bringing someone back to her hideaway, especially knowing what they will be doing once they reach there.

“We’re close to the ruin of the tower,” she tells him, and Dameron gives her a small smile. 

“It would be faster to ride the Winds, but I was told not to try it, in Jakku, not if anything else would do. On the way here, I had to drop out of the Summer-sky miles out -- I’ve never felt the Winds so unstable. It felt -- almost hostile,” he says, and she nods. 

“There was a powerful witch-storm unleashed here, years ago. During the war. They say it was terrifying, that it will take a long time for everything to heal. A lot of people died, and it’s made the Darkness respond strangely, all over the desert, and the Winds are unreliable. Dangerous, even, unless you know exactly what you’re doing.”

“I’m not used to not knowing exactly what I’m doing. In the Winds,” he adds too quickly, and she almost expects him to blush, though he does not. “I’ve been riding them since I was a child. My mother used to say if I could take the Winds instead of walking up and down stairs, I would have,” he continues, and then falls suddenly silent, as the dark shell of Tower-That-Is-Broken comes into view over the sprawl of the sand, just as the edge of the sun sinks into the ground. 

Rey removes her shields from doors, undoes the wards on the stones right inside, and motions him in. She uses Craft to light her lamps, and as Dameron takes in the marks on the wall, the sand eating away at the ruin of the Tower, she tells herself she would have brought him here no matter what. He would have wished to see a place where Black Widows once dwelled. Where one dwells again. 

She undoes her headwrap, folding it neatly away, and lets her hair loose from its coiled loops. Her arm coverings are next, and then she pulls off her belt, unlaces her shirt at the neck. In the flickering, oily lamp-light, Dameron’s face looks like honeyed gold, touched with shadow, and she takes a deep breath, summoning every ounce of her strength, and reaches out for him, fingers coming to rest on his warm, unshaven cheek. 

He catches her wrist in between his hands, fixing her in place with his dark, hooded eyes. 

“We don’t have to do this,” he says softly, like he knows her heart is about to leap out of her chest. 

“We do. I do,” Rey says, and leans back in, kisses him firmly on the mouth. “I saw it in the last Tangled Web I wove,” she says, and watches his eyes widen. “If I don’t have my Virgin Night now, I will not live to have one at all.”

 _Break me, and you will never get what your Queen sent you for_ , she thinks, knows he sees it without her sending it into his mind. 

“Alright, Rey,” Dameron says. “It’ll be all right.” And kisses her back.


	3. Chapter 3

**Kylo.**

He is no longer Ben Solo, and not yet Prince Ren when he makes his Offering to Darkness. The makeshift altar he has constructed is slicked with rain, the night around him full of sounds. The droplets of water hitting the leaves, plinking off of the stone path. His own breath, a rough wheeze in his throat, his pulse, insistent, in his temples. He cautiously reaches out on a Red thread, but there is nothing; he is alone here, with nothing but his fears and the night to keep him company.

He is nobody; not a student of Luke’s, not his mother’s son, or a member of her court, or Prince Solo, and maybe that’s what makes him falter, makes him weak, makes him _unworthy_.

When the sun breaks the horizon, the Jewel on the altar isn’t Black. It _is_ dark, but not dark enough, not the flat, deep black of the starless night he has spent here. A slight silver sheen reflects off of the faded surface; the stone is icy to the touch when he picks it up, as if it, too, judges him and finds him wanting.

The Offering to Darkness can only be made once; he knows that as he clutches the jewel in his fist, and yet he still tries, desperately, to reach, just a little bit farther. The Abyss below him sings, a stormy, beautiful maelstrom, but does not invite him in.

When he reaches out to Snoke the next night, it’s on the Red first, out of the long-ingrained habit. Catching himself, he descends further into the Red than he ever has, and keeps going, spiraling lower still. When he thrums the Ebon-gray thread, Kylo Ren is surprised to find his teacher is not displeased.

 

**Rey.**

She wakes up with her face mashed into Dameron’s -- Poe’s -- chest, the taste of sweat and salt in her mouth. The lamps have gone out sometime in the night, and the air is steadily growing grey from pitch-black, morning approaching soon. Rey feels sore all over when she untangles herself from Poe, body unused to sharing the small sleeping space; a deeper soreness is rolling between her legs, though she remembers him soothing it earlier with his clever mouth. Her cheeks grow hot at the memory, and she slides out of the bedding as quickly as she can without disturbing him.

On the uncovered walkway of the tower, the pre-dawn wind cooling her heated skin, she loops the spider-silk around the little wooden frame, fingers working quickly, braiding and tying familiar knots, pulling the threads taut around each other. She feeds a few drops of her blood into the Web, and almost knocks it over in disbelief. Fear, cold and sticky, winds its way up her spine, spreading its slimy feelers along the back of her neck.

“No, no, this isn’t right,” she mutters to herself, and turns around at the sudden feel of someone behind her. Poe has walked out onto the ruined balcony, wrapped in her threadbare blanket; he is watching her work with undisguised interest.

“Were you followed here? To Niima? Did someone see you, aside from Unkar Plutt’s men?” she asks, more sharply than she intended; Poe furrows his brows, still looking at the Tangled Web between her hands.

“I didn’t come alone, exactly. My Sheltie wouldn’t dream of letting me go off on my own for too long -- well, she isn’t _mine_ , it’s more the other way around. We split up in Reestkii; she’s supposed to find me back in Cratertown. Though I am guessing that isn’t what you meant.”

Rey has never met any Kindred; the locals think them closer to myth than reality, and she had come close to thinking they were right. Another time, she might have asked him more about them, especially one he can speak of as his, but now, Poe comes a few steps closer, cocking his head at the spider-silk on its frame. “This thing, this web, it’s fascinating. I’ve never seen anything like it. I can almost tell there’s something hiding inside, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. You can, though? It is saying something to you?”

“Yes,” she says, afraid down to her bones, but reluctant to pull the threads apart just yet. She runs her fingers over them again, and closes her eyes, trying to make the image stronger. “Fire. I see fire. Something is coming. Something terrifying. To Tuanul, to the Oasis, to Niima. There’s a man -- a Red Jewel -- a mask? And there are soldiers, and, Poe, they’re after you. And after whatever you find here. And they’re close. Really close.”

“The First Order,” Poe says grimly, like what her Web has shown is no surprise. “I was hoping there was more time. We have to get out of here; we have to get you to the Queen. She will need your help.”

“With what?” Rey asks, unable to turn away from the vision, the fire blooming through the sand, the faces twisted up in the flames. “What does your Queen need with a Black Widow?”

Poe moves closer, crouches down next to her on the stone floor.

“Her Master of the Guard has been lost, for some years. A Black Widow is our only hope for bringing him back.”

“Lost?” she says, fingers absently plucking at the threads of pain and horror in her web. How lost can someone be before a Black Widow is the only one capable of finding them?

“He is lost in the Twisted Kingdom,” Poe says, warm breath huffing over her ear, and she whips towards him, incredulous, meets his dark worried eyes with her own.

“For years? I don’t know if anyone can help with that! I mean -- I can try. I can promise you nothing, but I can try.”

“Thank you,” he says solemnly, and puts his hand over hers. “Luke, he isn’t just Leia’s Master of the Guard, he is her brother -- and not just her brother, either, he’s -- ”

Luke. Leia. Even here, in Jakku, at the edge of the world, these names have been heard and repeated.

“Luke Skywalker. You want me to help you find Luke Skywalker, in The Twisted Kingdom,” Rey says, setting the remnants of her web on the crumbling stone. Above them, the sun has slipped into the sky, painting the sands in pink and gold. And there, on the horizon, against its brilliant rising disk, a black mass whorls and writhes, the soldiers’ boots shifting up the dust, coming closer, and in her mind’s eye, above the ruined shreds of spider-silk, she can almost make out the individual figures, light glinting off their blades, a knight in a black billowing cloak leading the charge.

“Poe, we have to go, now,” she says, scrabbling back inside, throwing a few things haphazardly into a tattered pack.

“I can’t leave without BeeBee,” Poe tells her as he pulls his uniform back on, the shiny braiding at the shoulders dulled a bit after a night on her floor.

“Your -- Kindred friend? The Sheltie? Cratertown is not exactly easy to get to from here, and there's no cover. If we see them, they will see us, and they have -- “ she pauses, reaching out into the Darkness and recoils, breath caught in her throat. “Hell’s fire, they have a Warlord Prince at the killing edge. If we don't disappear now, we are as good as dead.”

They’ll never make it, she realizes, as they run outside; the soldiers are too close already, and in the open desert, there is nowhere for her and Poe to hide. They will be seen for miles on the trek to Cratertown, and if even a fraction of what the Tangled Web has shown her is true, then -- Rey can’t allow herself to think of what’s going to happen.

“The Winds,” she says, grabbing Poe’s hand. “I know I said they are unstable here, but -- I think they may be our chance.” She cannot give in to fear now, she tells herself, and feels Poe’s fingers clutch back at hers, harder. “It’s dangerous, but I think it can be done.”

She feels him tense against her for a moment, considering, but then he nods.

“OK. On the count of three, together,” he says, and she reaches out in the Darkness, senses him do the same. The Summer-sky wind roils at the edge of her awareness, and then Poe is pulling her in, trying to hold her close against its fury.

It’s a mistake, Rey knows, as soon as they are hurtling forward through the gale; there haven’t been landing webs in the Jakku desert for years, there are no beacons set to guide their path. The Wind is twisting, howling, churning; she feels Poe’s hand slip from hers, and then she is _thrown_ far ahead, into what feels like the center of the maelstrom.

“Poe!” she tries to yell, but she can barely hear herself over the wind’s howl; she thinks she sees a flash of the gold braid at his shoulders somewhere out of the corner of her eye. “Poe! Poe!”

 

**Kylo.**

Starkiller Hall is hidden in the mountainside, carved into the living black rock within. When he joins Phasma in the small practice yard on one of the upper ledges, the snow-crusted peaks are all that Kylo can see for miles, leaden clouds coming to rest upon the tallest.

The cold helps. He strips off his heavy cloak and his shirt, feeling the sting of the frigid mountain air on his overheated skin. It isn’t enough, but it’s a start, he thinks, watching Phasma remove her padded leather coat. She moves with a ruthless, efficient grace, the corded muscle of her arms promising him the fight he so badly needs.

He knows he could have liked Phasma, in another lifetime. Her discipline, her strength, the force behind her left hook. The blond hair, suddenly soft around her haughty face, the sweep of red paint over her severe, sharp-toothed mouth. She wears her Blood Opal set in a polished hammered collar around her milk-pale neck, and chips of her birthright Jewel flicker over the thick rings on her right hand; Kylo has had his cheek sliced open by their bite, has worn the prints of her fists on his face. Her fists have been his only rut-partners for years, now, and he could wish for none better. Though his Jewels are darker, every bruise she’s given him has been a lesson, and he looks forward to another as he squares off opposite her in the hard, packed-down snow.

The first time he had gone into rut, he had been terrified. He had never been raised around Warlord Princes, not in his former Court, and not here at the Hall, and he’d had a clinical, bookish understanding of what would happen to him, what he would feel, want, _need_.

The books had left him woefully unprepared.

He had expected a want that was quantifiable, tangible. A craving much like his childish ones for sweets, or later, for drink, something to be dealt with or indulged at his decision, if not at his leisure. He hadn’t counted on it to be wholly unsubject to reason. Couldn’t have anticipated its hot, blazing fury, closer to rage than desire, overwhelming, irresistible, and entirely without focus.

Later, Hux had disdainfully told him he had destroyed a training room, and then another; he had watched the high points of color blooming on Hux’s sallow cheeks, matching the Rose Jewels at his lapels, and fisted his hands, pushed his nails into the soft, tender flesh of his own palms. He could have destroyed Hux with a word, with one blast of the Red, without even thinking of calling in his descended Jewel; there was no law against murder even here, though he suspected Snoke would have made him hurt for days in recompense. Kylo has lost count of the number of times he has restrained himself from unleashing his full strength at Hux since, from decimating him with the Ebon-gray, from wringing that wan throat with his bare hands. Master Snoke may value the contents of Hux’s devious, tactical brain, but it has no such value to Kylo; sometimes just the thought of Hux having their Master’s ear sends Kylo almost to the killing edge, from which he takes hours to come down.

If he kills Hux, he thinks, bracing himself for Phasma’s Opal-shielded swing, it will leave her as the only living person at Starkiller Hall who dares to speak to him.

Aside from their Master’s, Kylo’s is the strongest, darkest Jewel here. Phasma, hailing from the same academy in the Old Capital as Hux, is the only other one who wears anything of strength. Hux’s Rose does not put him even close to her power, and yet he wears it as confidently as she does her Opal, and that is enough to keep the rest of the recruits in line. They are just light-Jeweled Blood, and Kylo knows there are soldiers here who wear no Jewels at all, tending to some of Snoke’s needs, or wants, or plans; he hasn’t bothered to find out. They are all terrified of him as it is; he cannot begin to imagine the fear he would undoubtedly inspire by expressing a personal interest.

He allows Phasma’s next blow to connect, and doesn’t let his own shields cushion the impact; this rut has come on him out of turn, unexpected, and he would like to dispense with it as soon as his nature permits it. He had felt the first stirrings of it back in Jakku, his skin prickling, as if his entire body had been going pins and needles, but he had chalked it up to the desert heat at first, the dry, sharp wind that had stirred up grit and sand over everything in sight. By the time they had gone through the ruins of Tuanul and moved further into the dunes, finding nothing for all their efforts, he knew he had been wrong, and let himself be careless with Red and Ebon-gray both as they smashed through the western, and then the eastern outposts.

Destroying the miserable clutch of huts their scabby residents had called Cratertown and Reestkii had gone a long way to bring him down, but he could still feel the irrational, angry heat under his skin as they returned to Starkiller Hall. He had sought Phasma out as soon as the Red Wind had deposited him in the outer courtyard, and paced the long corridor like a caged beast as he’d waited for her to secure the new prisoner before she could give him her undivided attention.

When Kylo leaves the practice yard, it is a shambles. There is blood trickling down his chin from his split lip, and his eye is blackened. His cheekbone smarts, but isn’t broken, and his chest is a red, tender mess, beginning to bruise darker.

Phasma watches him go, trailing her fingers over her spent, nearly drained Jewel, and calls in her Birthright to clean herself up and fix her uniform coat. She vanishes her ripped gloves; they are her favorite pair, and she thinks she may have them mended. Prince Ren is headed to the prisoner’s cell; she does not want to be anywhere close when he sets to his task in there. She decides she will wait until he is done before she sends any of her men to clean up the training yard.

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, feel free to poke me on [tumblr](http://cracktheglasses.tumblr.com/)!


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